Is the Spanish economy positioned at its optimal progressivity level in personal income tax? This article quantifies the aggregate, distributional, and welfare consequences of moving toward such an optimal level. A heterogeneous households general equilibrium model featuring both life cycle and...

This paper analyses optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between wage rates and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants of across-household heterogeneity in second...

The elasticity of taxable income is a key tax policy parameter that plays an important role in the formulation of tax and transfer policy. This paper extends work by Kemp (2019) by using a new panel of individual tax returns and the phenomenon of 'bracket creep' to produce updated estimates of...

By constructing a social welfare function that incorporates the explicit value judgments of Atkinson's measure of inequality, the paper develops implications of optimal income taxation derived using double limit analysis for transfers and inequality. The losses arising from transfers in the...

We consider the interplay between income distribution and optimal commodity taxation, linking equity issues to optimal taxes through the effect of income distribution on market demand and its price elasticity.We find conditions to conciliate the equity and efficiency tradeoff and to assess the...

We consider the interplay between income distribution and optimal commodity taxation, linking equity issues to optimal taxes through the effect of income distribution on market demand and its price elasticity. We find conditions to conciliate the equity and efficiency tradeoff and to assess the...

Commodity taxes play an important role in Brazil and raise around 60% of the total tax revenue. This heavy reliance renders commodity taxation one of the main tools available to the government for collecting revenue and securing redistribution. In fact, Brazilian income inequity is one of the...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear income tax systems for families based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between the wage rates of mothers as "second earners" and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants...

Survey evidence shows that the magnitude of the tax liability plays a role in value judgements about which groups deserve tax breaks. We demonstrate that the German tax-transfer system conflicts with a welfarist inequality averse social planner. It is consistent with a planner who is averse to...

We study the impact of endogenous longevity on optimal tax progressivity and inequality in an overlapping generations model with skill heterogeneity. Higher tax progressivity decreases both the longevity gap and net income inequality, but at the expense of lower average lifetime and lower...